Quoted from pinfixer:

Great stories and insight. I'll chime in because no one has yet described an experience like mine. I, for the most part, have always had a pinball in my life. I bought my 1st game in 1978 when I was seven, and still own it to this day. My collection went all over the place in the 80's and 90's. I bought a warehouse and subsequently vacuumed up a ton of machines and placed them in the warehouse. Being from rural MN no one really wanted used or non-working pins back then, so people found me and picked up the phone (yes, before the internet and cell phones). Your ad in the PinGame Journal was the only real way to connect with other pinball collector types at the time. By the end of the 90's the warehouse was full to the rafters with over 125 pins.
I then made a very deliberate decision to decide what_ I wanted to collect. Was it EM games, a certain theme, a certain manufacturer, or a certain era? After pondering that question I decided I wanted one of every solid state Bally title made using the -17 and -35 boardset (6800 processor). A feat I accomplished earlier this year after about a 25 year hunt. Almost all the DMD pins are gone, solid state GTB and WMS are all gone, and almost all the EM's. Just a room full of Bally pins from 77-85. It makes it much easier to maintain since they all use about the same parts, boards interchange for the most part, and when you've been doing it as long as I have you get a "feel" for what the manufacturer was thinking when the game was made.
I just offloaded a HH and BH that I'd been holding on to for years and years so I am still continuing to thin the herd. Didn't bother me one bit. As others have said, I rarely play pinball, but rather enjoy the process of bringing them back to life more than anything. The people in this hobby are my closest friends and associates. It's really all I've known all my life. I went to college for electronics and wanted to make a living fixing pinballs, but life gave me a left turn and I entered the Gaming industry (slot machines) as my day job. In retrospect it was a very happy accident in giving me two distinct focuses. One a hobby, the other a career.
During my life I've moved once, married once (still married), and have one child. NOTHING is more satisfying to me than your child pulling at your hand saying "Daddy, let's go play pinball!" I hope everyone experiences that at least once in their life! Pinball ebbs and flows in how much time I give it, but for it to be gone 100% would be an impossibility for me.